Sunday, March 19, 2006

I must admit, it has been a rather interesting couple of weeks. Bar-none this is has been the longest stretch of time that I haven’t spent time to write a post here since I started this thing. I kept thinking, “I really need to write something for my blog”, but then never sat down to write. If I were to make up an excuse, I would blame my lack of writing on the anonymous commenter from a post in February that asked if my blog would continue to be about my homework assignments, or if it was going to be about me. I won’t use as an excuse, but I will say that it has given me a bit to think about, as a lot of my life is school and homework. I guess I just wasn’t meeting that particular reader’s needs. There’s a part of me that wonders what I could have done differently, and there is another that basically says to hell with it. It’s my blog, and I’ll write what I please. Anyhow, lack of recent writing aside, I may have something to say this morning.

Spring break came and went last week, and I can’t say that I did a whole lot of anything important. I did play a lot of World of Warcraft. Yes, what a geeky thing to indulge, but I don’t do it much at all when I am in school, and I was quite frazzled when spring break started, so it proved to be a nice distraction. It was also good to re-convene with some online gaming friends that I hadn’t played with in many months. Online gaming can become quite the obsession, and though I had a great time this last week playing, (a lot more than I should have) I am reminded that there are a lot of “real life” adventures that tend to be more profitable as far as one’s invested time is concerned. But everyone needs a vacation sometime, and I just happened to take mine in a virtual world. However, it is a good thing that tomorrow morning it is back to work and school.

Work is providing me with some interesting projects. The only downside is that I am expected to work more hours as they haven’t as of yet found a replacement person for the QA work that I do. The programming that I have done has given me a pretty great introduction into web development with Java, and more generally how one can use Java with the IBM iSeries. My fist project was to build a simple tracking application, and I did the whole thing manually using pure Java Server Pages. Once that was done, I created some executable .jars that could run on the iSeries, and at the end of last week I started on my third Java project. This one I will be using the Struts framework. I am excited to use Struts, as it looks like it will save me some time on this next project. Though none of these projects are major, it is really great to be able to apply my education, and spend some time mastering a particular domain. So much of what we do at school is firmly grounded in “principle” and “theory”, it is interesting to see what happens in “practice”.

School is much of what it has been since January. I have referred to it as the 16 week marathon, and I still think that the comparison holds. The compiler project is moving along, but gets more complex with each passing week. I think that someone jumping into the code at this point would have no idea what it was doing. There are just too many classes to keep track of. The Algorithms class is really turning out to be a pain; I feel that we are getting a really mixed set of messages as to what the course is really about, and in what amount of detail we are supposed to process the information. Team programming is still quite a bit of fun. We haven’t actually done much programming in the last little bit, as we have been focusing on learning design techniques and UML. I am sure that as we get back into things this next week, we will be back at the keyboards again however. One thing I can say is that C# is a pretty impressive language.

I attended a couple of music recitals at the University of Utah School of Music in the last few weeks and have nothing but great things to say for the vocal rep composed by Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Recordings are hard to find (at least on iTunes), but the music is some of the most amazing stuff I have ever heard. It is simply outstanding.

I think that wraps it up for this evening. I am going to try to get back into this blogging thing, all fears aside. I am learning a lot of things as I go through the routine of my life, and some of it might be interesting to you, and if it wasn’t at least it was interesting to me.

2 comments:

Glad to see you back at it. One of the reasons I switched to a photoblog was because my writing was useless, thoughless, and boring but I found photography to be the new language of my expression... I don't know that it has really made things any easier though!